THEIR FAN FAVORITES

As they prepared to start work on the new season, some of the cast members considered their favorite scenes from Season 2, as fans as well as performers.

Slattery was struck by watching January Jones fall apart as Betty Draper. “Even though I know she’s pretending, the actress is really having these emotions, and it’s really exciting to watch,” he says. “When her character starts to slide into depression, and she’s face down on the couch and wakes up and yells for the baby-sitter after passing out drinking red wine, that was pretty great.”

All chose the same scene. In the season’s final episode, Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell tells Moss’ secretary turned adwoman Peggy Olson -- long after a one-night (well, two) stand -- that he’s in love with her, and, in return, she confesses she had his child and gave the baby up. It’s a shift in power as the revelation leaves Pete devastated.

John Slattery

Christina Hendricks, Vincent Kartheiser, Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss

“It’s just brutal honesty on both sides; two people are being real with each other, and really seeing each other,” Kartheiser says.

“It doesn’t end well for either of them, and it’s just heartbreaking,” Hendricks says.

Hamm agrees. “It was beautiful and sad, and a resolution to a two-year-long cliffhanger in many ways.”

Adds Moss, “We’d done everything those characters had gone through, so we were really ready for it.” The audience was really ready as well, she adds. “It was satisfying on an acting level and as a fan of the show myself.”

January Jones

For her part, Jones loved the moment in the season’s first episode “when Don (Jon Hamm) is writing a letter with a quote from ‘Meditations in an Emergency.’ It was one of the only times the show used voice-over, and it was a very mysterious and beautiful moment that I kept coming back to as I watched the entire season,” she says. “I didn’t know who the letter was being sent to, so it was a question that wasn’t answered until the end of the season.”

-- Lisa Rosen